Cornwall Film Festival // God's Own Country

God's Own Country has been picking up awards left and right, including a best director prize at Sundance and the prestigious Michael Powell award at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Francis Lee's remarkable debut feature tells a story of Johnny Saxby, a taciturn young man, who lives on a failing Yorkshire farm with his father and grandmother. Unhappy and frustrated with his life, he numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex. But when Gheorghe, a Romanian migrant worker, is brought in to help during lambing season, it ignites an intense relationship between them that sets Johnny on a new path.

 

It's a perceptive, intelligent film with outstanding ensemble performances and a worthy winner of our British breakthrough first-time filmmaker award. The Yorkshire-born Lee eschews sentimentality for realism, acknowledging that while the British countryside is beautiful, it can also be wild, lonely and profoundly estranging.

 

We are delighted to be joined on stage by the acclaimed writer Patrick Gale, author of the new BBC drama, Man in an Orange Shirt and of novels including A Perfectly Good Man, The Whole Day Through, the Richard and Judy bestseller Notes From An Exhibition and his latest, the Costa nominated A Place Called Winter to discuss the impact of the Gay Britannia season and the importance of queer content on our screens in 21st Century Britain. 

 

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